Turkey Must Never Be Allowed To Join The European Union

May 3, 2015

By Emerson Vermaat

April 15, 2015 – San Francisco, CA – PipeLineNews.org – It's been one hundred years [April 24, 1915] since the Armenian genocide began in Turkey. The Ottoman Empire was in decline and the Ottoman government wanted to exterminate the two million strong Armenian Christian community. About one-and-a-half million Armenian Christians were killed or died from starvation. So many Armenians, even children, were thrown into the river Euphrates that the water turned red. Women were raped, their throats were subsequently slashed or they were sold as sex slaves. Christian girls were crucified, numerous men were shot dead, bayoneted or hanged. Armenian houses and properties were confiscated. It was not very different from the way the ruthless "Islamic State" barbarians deal with Christians and other minorities in Iraq and Syria today.

Subsequent Turkish governments invariably denied that the Armenians were massacred by the army or by death squads. And for decades the world didn't seem to care about it either. That is why Hitler said in August 1939: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

This was one of the reasons why Hitler felt encouraged to execute his plan to exterminate millions of Jews in Europe.

Pope Francis recently called the Armenian genocide "the first genocide of the Twentieth Century." The Turkish government was really upset. As the Wall Street Journal reported: "Turkey, which has long rejected the term genocide to describe the killings, swiftly called its ambassador to the Vatican back to Ankara for consultations after the Pope's remarks. Turkey's foreign ministry also summoned the Vatican's envoy to Ankara, informing him that the government was ‘disappointed and saddened' by the pontiff's comments, according to Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency."

During World War I, Turkey, then known as "the Ottoman Sultanate" or "Ottoman Caliphate", sided with the Germans. But the Germans and the Turks lost the war. A new Turkish leader emerged after the war. His name was Mustafa Kemal, after 1934 also known as Kemal Atatürk ("Father of the Turks"). The sultanate was abolished in 1922 and the caliphate and its shari'a courts were abolished in March 1924. Atatürk became the first president of the new Turkish republic in October 1923. Atatürk was a military man during World War I. There is no evidence that he was involved in the Armenian genocide himself. But he did not stop the genocide either, and after the First World War he and his movement did play a role in suspending war crimes trials.

On the other hand Kemal Atatürk strongly opposed Islamic radicalism. He wanted Twentieth Century Turkey to be a modern, secular and pro-Western state. He banned religion based clothing such as the veil. Women were allowed to become members of parliament. Atatürk and his successors emphasized that the Turkish military and state should be strong enough to resist any takeover by religious fanatics – who had and still have a strong backing in the conservative countryside. After the Second World War Turkey became a strong ally of the United States and Israel, although many conservative Turks as well as a lot of Turkish immigrants in Europe espoused anti-Semitism.

German Security Service reports on Turkish militants in Germany

Muslim radicals or "Islamists" gained a victory in 1996 when Necmettin Erbakan became Prime Minister of Turkey. He was the leader and founder of the Islamist Welfare Party ("Refah Partisi" or RP). He was also the founder of "Milli Görüs." an anti-Semitic organization with branches in, inter alia, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. The German branch is closely monitored by the "Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz" (BfV) or the Federal Security Service. The Security Service reported, for example, that Milli Görüs followers want to establish shari'a law and believe that democracy and Islam are incompatible. Many of them also deny the Holocaust – "the legend that six million Jews were murdered" – and believe that "Zionists" want to rule the whole world. According to them, "the aim of Zionism is world domination," and Jews "must be cursed." Notorious anti-Semitic books such as Henry Ford's "The International Jew" were found in a Milli Görüs mosque in Munich.

As Prime Minister of Turkey Erbakan paid highly controversial visits to Libya and Iran. Fortunately, the army intervened and forced Erbakan to resign in 1997. But in 2001 a new Islamist party was founded by Recep Tayyib Erdogan, a former mayor of Istanbul. It was the "Justice and Development Party" or "Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi" (AKP). Erdogan rejects the concept of secularism and opposes the ideas of Kemal Atatürk. He wants to restore the Ottoman Caliphate.

He once said: "Democracy is like a train: when you reach your destination you get off." Another interesting quote from him: "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers." This is what he said back in 1998. After he became Prime Minister in 2003 he curbed the power of the army as well as the freedom of the press and sided with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Erdogan paid several visits to Iran, the first in October 2009, the second in January 2014 and the third quite recently – on April 7, 2015. In recent years, though, Erdogan criticized Iran's role in the Middle East. In 2009, before the turmoil of the so-called Arab Spring, that is, he referred to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was president of Iran at the time, as "our friend." The same Ahmadinejad was and still is a notorious Holocaust denier.

Erdogan also paid a visit to Syria in 2004 and visa requirements were subsequently abolished. Migrant and human traffickers were quite happy about this decision. But relations with Syria's president Bashar al-Assad turned sour after the Syrian civil war broke out in March 2011.

The German Security Service reported in 2013/14 that the Turkish Deputy Prime Minister paid a visit to a Milli Görüs mass gathering in Hasselt (Belgium) in May 2013. This Turkish politician saluted 20,000 militant Turks on behalf of Prime Minister Erdogan. I do not doubt that Erdogan fully endorses the anti-Semitic views of Milli Görüs. So do too many Turks in Turkey and Europe. They hate Israel, the so-called "Zionists " and the Jews. "Israel surpasses Hitler in barbarism," Erdogan said in July 2014. Burak Bekdil, an excellent and well-informed Turkish columnist, criticized Erdogan in October 2014 for "his constant bashing and deep hatred of the Jewish state." One month later Bekdil wrote: "For most of Turkey's Islamists, there is no diffference between the words ‘Israel', ‘Israeli government', ‘Jew', and ‘Turkish Jew'. They are all the same and are all regarded with hostility."

Back in 2004 I wrote a lengthy and well-documented Dutch study on "Crime, Migration and Culture." In those days leading political parties in the Netherlands were in favor of Turkish membership of the European Union. The Christian Democrats, for example, believed that Erdogan's party was "a fraternal party." I was strongly opposed to these ideas. I warned that "the external borders of the European Union should not be expanded in such a way that the instable Middle East is within reach. "We will then import even more crime and terrorism from that region," I wrote in my book. European governments are simply unable to cope with the powerful Turkish mafia. I later discovered that some German-Turkish immigrants were also highly critical of Turkish culture and values. One of them is Necla Kelek who wrote excellent and courageous books on radical Muslims, sharia, honor crimes and the repression of women.

Porous Turkish borders and corrupt border guards and police

As of this writing, terrorists are crossing the porous Turkish-Syrian border. Jihadists from Europe enter Syria via Turkey in the thousands and corrupt Turkish customs officials or border guards do not stop them. As Newsweek reported last November: "Border guards turn a blind eye when cash in suitcases or trucks containing oil or goods passes through their checkpoints." "ISIS commanders in Raqqa openly talked about the best foreign jihadists crossing into Syria from Turkey," Sherko Omer writes in Newsweek. (Raqqa is the so-called "capital" of Islamic State.) "Once, I heard that some ISIS foreign jihadists had been stopped by the Turkish border guards and police, but such were the ISIS connections that they were soon freed and safely on their way to Syria." "A Homeland Security Department agent said that due to ISIS's dependence on criminal networks, it is forced to trade mainly in cash. Operating in such a fashion is not difficult, as $1 million to $2 million can easily fit into one briefcase."

There are ISIS terror cells in many Turkish cities, including Instanbul. Western security services are warning that well-trained ISIS terrorists from Syria and North Africa are now entering Europe disguised as asylum seekers. They may target a nuclear reactor in France, the Netherlands or Britain. Or they may seek to kill Pope Francis.

Emerson Vermaat is an investigative reporter in the Netherlands specialized in crime, terrorism and the Holocaust. He is currently writing a book on ISIS.

Richard G. Hovanisian (Ed.), Remembrance and Denial. The Case of the Armenian Genocide (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), p. 220. ("The rise of the Turkish resistance movement headed by Mustafa Kemal had the effect of first stalling, then suspending the trials.")